Restoring single folder or item in Open Source edition 8.0.0

Hi,

I'm running zcs-8.0.0_GA_5434.UBUNTU10_64.20120907144627, the open source edition. I know backup facilities are less then the commercial one, but even when improvising, how can I restore a single folder that a user has accidentally emptied? The Wiki page for backups describe how to recover a broken system, but not single items.

I administer several conventional courier-IMAP servers as well, and there I can just use my file backup system (rdiff-backup) to recover the file system entries. But, because Zimbra has a store on disk and an accompanying MySQL DB, that is harder.

The user in question has a folder containing thousands of mails that is suddenly empty. It's possible he accidentally chose 'empty folder'. He's restoring from the Trash folder now, but that's very limited. He can only restore 100 mails at a time, and it doesn't remember where messages came from; you have to select a target folder. A better trash would alleviate the lack of more complicated backup features.

phoenix' suggestion is what you are looking for, I used to couple rsync and zmlmtpinject with mysqldump - not for the whole database, see below - in order to backup my zimbra mailboxes myself before switching to the dark side (couldn't manage to waste anymore time on backup management so switched to ZeXtras).
In order to partially avoid needing to search the zimbra database for a mid->user match, I added the following command to the backup script: